Homepage - Vajra Books

Bestsellers

Add to cart

Drenpa’s Proclamation : The Rise and Decline of the Bon Religion in Tibet
$ 50.00
Add to cart

Tibetan Monastery Collections and Museums : Traditional Practices and Contemporary Issues
$ 60.00
Add to cart

Queens Without a Kingdom Worth Ruling : Buddhist Nuns and the Process of change in Tibetan Monastic Communities
$ 35.00
Add to cart

SPITI The Gigantic Valley of Many-Hued Strata : Archaeological and Historical Research in the Western Himalaya
$ 95.00
Add to cart

The Life and Work of Auleshi : Sherpa Buddhist Art and Adept
$ 18.00
Add to cart

Sakya Pandita’s Treatise on Music
$ 19.95
Add to cart

The Practice of the Tigle of the Elements
$ 16.00

Title of the Month

New Release

Tibetan Monastery Collections and Museums

Traditional Practices and Contemporary Issues

"With its detailed chapters, ranging from close-focus art historical analysis of Tibetan objects to theorised discussion of the processes of curating in Tibetan/ Himalayan contexts, I think the volume will be greatly appreciated by academics and students of Tibetan Buddhism and of Tibetan and Himalayan history and culture, as well as those in art history and in museum studies. It will also be invaluable for members of the communities where these museums have been created (especially in Nepal and Ladakh).”

- Clare Harris, Professor of Visual Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum
Ethnography, University of Oxford

Contributors: Christian Luczanits, Louise Tythacott, Hans-Werner Klohe, Isabella Cammarota, Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, Monique Filsnoel, Rebecca Bloom, Ziyi Shao, Nelly Rieuf, Emma Martin, Naomi Collick, Karolina Lisowski

Vajra Academic, Series Vol. VI

New Release

CHANDRA CHIARA EHM

Buddhist Nuns and the Process of change in Tibetan Monastic Communities

QUEENS WITHOUT A KINGDOM WORTH RULING

Looking through the walls of a cloistered monastic community, such as a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery, is nearly impossible as lay person. These religious communities are multi-layered in being simultaneously places of spiritual development, Buddhist scholasticism, and religious devotion. Chandra Chiara Ehm lived for nearly a decade behind the walls of Khachoe Ghakyil Ling nunnery in the Nepalese Himalayas. During this time, she collected the nuns’ stories and studied their lifestyle and their scholarship.

This book invites the reader to step through the convent’s walls to explore Tibetan monastic life from the perspective of the nuns. Her ethnography offers a first-hand account of life in the nunnery, carefully calibrated within a theoretical frame to investigate the historical social aspects of monastic institutions.

Another important theme Ehm depicts is the religious hierarchy and the remarkable changes that globalisation, feminism, and secularisation have brought to this gender balance and the nuns’ monastic life in recent years.

This vivid and comprehensive study of female monastic life provides novel insights with essential implications for the inter-and intra-religious analysis of monasticism today.